Living Proof is a science-first beauty brand, facing a particular retail challenge. How do they preserve the credibility and distinctiveness of its clinical heritage while creating an experience that feels warm, intuitive, and shoppable? When Living Proof set out to refresh its presence across North American stores, the strategic goal was clear. Translate its scientific origins into a warm, inviting customer experience while building a display system engineered to perform consistently across major retail channels.
For Living Proof, the system had to work at scale, communicate the brand consistently across Sephora US/Canada, Sephora at Kohl’s, and Ulta; accommodate multiple fixture configurations; maintain day-one performance after repeated shopper interactions; refresh easily with seasonal updates; and stay within budget to manufacture and deploy across North America.
As a design and manufacturing partner, The Bernard Group (TBG) stepped in to execute this brand evolution at scale, solving key visual merchandising and retail rollout challenges under one roof. This let teams test decisions at one stage against what would happen downstream. Teams could evaluate brand intent against real-world behavior. Engineering decisions could be tested against shopper interaction. Production requirements could inform design before they became rollout constraints.
Brand continuity leverages existing brand trust and the system creates a feedback loop in which each stage generates evidence to inform the next.
The Design Challenge: Elevating Science into Style
How do you bring a laboratory aesthetic into a fast-paced beauty retail setting while keeping it warm and approachable?
That question moved the work beyond aesthetics. The display had to translate Living Proof’s brand meaning into a hierarchy shoppers could understand at a glance.
TBG solved this design challenge by drawing direct inspiration from classic lab equipment, subtly abstracting familiar shapes into custom product glorifiers, sign holders, and signature lab beaker graphic stands. To soften the clinical feel, warm hues were infused into sleek materials, creating an environment that feels both scientifically precise and instantly inviting to shoppers.
Aesthetic decisions are backed by real-world retail experience. Custom metal glorifiers, acrylic tester holders, and magnetic graphics were designed to withstand heavy daily customer interactions while allowing store associates to perform effortless, rapid graphic updates during seasonal resets. The result balanced two seemingly competing signals: scientific authority and beauty-category approachability. Neither could dominate without weakening the other.
Scaling Design Excellence Across North America
Executing a retail refresh of this scope requires robust infrastructure and flexible display configurations. TBG brought Living Proof’s design concept to life across thousands of stores in the US and Canada, supporting both standalone Sephora locations, Sephora at Kohl’s shop-in-shops, and Ulta inline displays with 100% on-time shipments, 99.5% Arrived in Full, and little operational disruption to the store:
- Footprint: ~800 Sephora + ~850 Sephora at Kohl’s + ~120 Ulta
- Placements: 4-Shelf, 6-Shelf, and 6-Shelf Split configurations
- Materials Used: Premium acrylic, custom metals, custom vinyls, and eco-friendly recycled magnets
TBG developed the system as a family of repeatable components and configurations rather than a collection of isolated displays. That allowed the system to adapt locally while preserving a common visual and functional language across roughly 1,650 Sephora and Sephora at Kohl’s locations in the U.S. and Canada.
Built on TBG’s Core Values: “The Art of Teams”
Complex retail programs rarely move through a perfectly linear process. Priorities change. New constraints emerge. People enter and exit phases of the work. What protects performance is not dependence on a single designer or engineer, but continuity of knowledge across the system.
Over the multi-month development process, designers, engineers, project leads, production teams, and account partners worked from shared decisions and standards; ownership could shift without forcing the team to revisit decisions already made. The program retained its logic even as individual contributors changed.
“Embodying ‘The Art of Teams,’ the extensive multi-month design phase involved seamless collaboration across multiple designers, successfully handing off responsibilities during vacations and shifting workloads to maintain continuous momentum.” — Adam Tolsma
Closing the Proof Loop
From concept design to the final sales floor delivery, TBG eliminates vendor fragmentation by managing every step of the project lifecycle:
The advantage of connecting design, engineering, prototyping, manufacturing, deployment, inventory, and ongoing updates is not simply fewer vendors, it is better information.
Deployment showed where the system still had work to do. Instructions that seemed obvious during development were not always obvious in the store. Graphic kits exposed different questions once associates had to use them. Those moments were not failures in the process; they were evidence the next iteration could use them.
Rather than passing the work from one team to the next, the Living Proof program kept each stage connected so that what was learned in one phase could improve the next.
Idea, Design, Prototype, Engineer, Manufacture, Deploy, Maintain, Learn, Improve.
Each cycle creates new evidence that can inform the next.
Design & Prototype: Concept design, structural engineering, and rapid prototyping
Manufacturing: Precision printing, finishing, assembly, and sustainable material sourcing
Logistics & Support: Custom storefront portal, WMS inventory management, and ongoing fixture and graphic updates
“For Living Proof’s Sephora haircare refresh, our design and engineering teams partnered end-to-end to translate the brand’s clean, lab-driven identity into a fully re-engineered shelving system. From custom metal shelf risers and tester acrylic covers to the signature lab beaker graphic stands and sign holders, every element was built to hold up with daily in-store interaction.” — Lana Goodby
The result is a retail system that carries Living Proof’s scientific identity across different store formats and continues to work under the demands of busy beauty environments.
The program adds to a growing body of field evidence: how brand expression, materials, structural engineering, associate interaction, manufacturing, and deployment behave when tested together at scale. Each rollout becomes another experiment. Each store adds another data point. Each observation sharpens the hypothesis for what comes next.
Over time, that accumulated evidence becomes a knowledge base, turning retail execution into an ongoing cycle of testing, learning, refinement, and improved performance.
Ready for Your In-Store Retail Experience to Perform?
Retail performance rarely comes down to one decision. It is built through a series of connected choices: what the shopper notices, what associates use, what engineering can support, what manufacturing can reproduce, what logistics can deliver, and what the team learns once the program is in stores.
The strongest retail systems connect those decisions and create a testing loop that makes the next iteration better than the last.
This is the operating principle behind TBG’s Retail Performance System: firsthand experience becomes evidence, evidence improves judgment, and better judgment raises the standard of what retail can achieve.
TBG brings that philosophy into practice across the full retail lifecycle, from initial idea through design, engineering, production, deployment, maintenance, and continuous improvement.
Build a retail system that performs— partner with The Bernard Group Today.